Circular
Author's Note: Enjoy the story and R&R.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of the House of the Dead series.
Summary:
Curien was more valuable to Goldman dead.
Everything began from 0. 0 was the codeword his father labelled his masterpieces, representing the removal of the barrier between life and death.
Cyclic. A circle.
Fortune favours the brave; fate, those with strong constitutions. The men with vision capable of grasping the future and guiding the world toward it. The stomachs to engineer change, at the cost of stepping outside sanity.
His father and Goldman possessed these qualities. The patience to see their projects outlast them. The confidence their work would continue beyond their deaths, through the plans of those in their circle, or their work having the self-governance to run themselves.
To this day, Daniel is convinced his father's end wasn't an accident. Regardless of Dr. Curien's manic episodes, he was meticulous to a fault. He wouldn't have made a mistake during the Magician's programming.
It was an implanted flaw. There was no doubt in Daniel's mind that Goldman had planted an override when his father wasn't looking, causing the Magician to reject and ultimately destroy his creator.
Curien was more valuable to Goldman dead. He needed him dead if the Wheel of Fate was to begin its rotation.
What more fitting a fate? Than for the man who began it all to be destined to become the algorithm to end it all, and the electrical pulse jumpstarting humankind from zero after the flood? After the world (and the World) collapsed.
Such an outcome would satisfy both Goldman and Thornheart's sensibilities.
Fate is slow, where fortunes can turn on a dime. Daniel lived nineteen years in the literal shadow of Death (the security guard) – significantly longer than his original prognosis – as people were slaughtered on the other side of the door, a level down from the chamber containing his father's reanimated body.
That room one lift ride down was the only place he was guaranteed protection. A safe zone demarcated by the Wheel of Fate's computerized consciousness, from which Daniel ate, slept, learned to shoot, and watched the nightmare unfold.
He feels it necessary to make the distinction: The creatures roaming the EFI Research Facility aren't – weren't ever – human. Up until Mr. Rogan and his team arrived, there were but two true successes. Two who could be classified resurrected.
Father and son.
The rest were carbon copies of each other, grown in glass tubes and steel cylinders by following set instructions on how to produce them. That's why Daniel never experienced guilt killing the monsters from afar. They weren't human. They violated natural laws (though Goldman would surely argue the opposite).
But Daniel won't acknowledge the metal man at the heart of the EFI Research Facility as his father. He didn't recognize his father – not even as a matter of "anymore"; rather, this cursed thing, like the augments in Goldman's building, was mere mimicry.
His father's crime stared him in the face. His own reflection…and the deathly still, blank stare of the Wheel of Fate.
For some, the thought of their parents hovering over them like guardian angels would be a comfort.
They don't live with the levitating remains of a father humming upstairs.